Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? A question that gets thrown around a lot around the holiday season. But it’s time to stop. Of course it’s a Christmas movie. For many, it’s a staple of the Christmas period – a must watch.
With that out of the way, it’s time to point something out. Although Die Hard certainly is a Christmas movie, it wasn’t the first action movie to get festive. That credit belongs to Lethal Weapon, an action classic in itself that came out a year before Die Hard. So, let’s delve into the details and throw some easter eggs your way in the process.
Lethal Weapon: A Bona Fide Christmas Flick
Although dark in places, Lethal Weapon is spliced with the right amount of comedy. However, it is the darkest entry in the quadrilogy. Going in to the movie for the first time, you’d be tricked into thinking it was going to be somewhat upbeat as “Jingle Bell Rock” by Bobby Helms plays over the opening sequence. As we pan in on a high-rise Los Angeles apartment complex, a young woman jumps to her death, serving as a mystery that unravels a deep layer of corruption in Los Angeles. This striking juxtaposition of a classic joyful song playing over a horrendous scenario is jarring, but it works.
From here, this buddy cop action thriller is littered with festive elements. The movie’s events take place in a 2-week period leading up to Christmas. Hollywood Boulevard is transformed with Christmas lights and decorations, some of the bad guys wear Santa hats early in the film, and Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) go from hating each other to becoming close buddies, a gentle nod to A Christmas Carol, where flawed characters rise and shine. The movie’s final frame falls on Christmas day where the once depressed Riggs lets his guard down and has dinner with the Murtaugh family, closing out with Elvis Presley‘s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”.
The Christmas Carnage of Die Hard
Lethal Weapon was a major box office success, grossing $120.2 million worldwide against a $15 million budget. This triumph proved that audiences would embrace an action movie set at Christmas. So, Lethal Weapon producer Joel Silver bared this in mind when he helped cultivate Die Hard. In formula, the two movies are similar, focusing on somewhat rogue policemen who are willing to bend the rules to protect the innocent. Both John McClane (Bruce Willis) and Martin Riggs (Gibson) are loveable bad boy types. However, where Die Hard shifted gears was with the reluctant hero aspect. McClane is thrust into a situation he doesn’t want to be in, but still rises to the occasion.
This category of action film set off a whole sub-genre where our hero is trapped in a confined setting, with movies like Speed, Under Siege, and Sudden Death following. While Die Hard is a unique film and certainly an innovator, its Christmas setting was taken right from Lethal Weapon. Die Hard is set on Christmas Eve and the carnage carries over into the early hours of Christmas Day. Both movies start and end with a Christmas song, and festive one-liners are spliced throughout. So, yes – Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but Lethal Weapon took that crown first.
The Shane Black Christmas Signature
Credit must be given to Shane Black for the Christmas action movie craze, seeing as he wrote Lethal Weapon. Die Hard surpassed Lethal Weapon at the box office, grossing over $140 million. With that, the Christmas backdrop was cemented as a winner for action movies. Die Hard 2: Die Harder kept the theme going and movies like The Long Kiss Goodnight followed. Black wrote the latter movie, and it wouldn’t be his last film with a Christmas backdrop. He also set Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and The Nice Guys at this jolly time of year.
Black has been asked many times where his proclivity to set his films at Christmas comes from. It’s not exactly that he loves Christmas, as most of his films are a dark take on the time of year. Reportedly, he was in inspired to set Lethal Weapon around the Christmas period after watching the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford, which was set against Christmas shopping and carols. When quizzed about why he continued to do so, he told Entertainment Weekly: “Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives. I tend to think also that it just informs as a backdrop.”
Fun Facts & Easter Eggs
Beyond sharing the Christmas setting, these two iconic action movies are connected in fascinating ways. As mentioned, both films were produced by Joel Silver, and with that came similar production units. Die Hard and Lethal Weapon shared 38 crew members, creating an unofficial pipeline between the two productions.
But the most sizzling irony lies in their casting near-misses. Bruce Willis was offered the role of Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon but turned it down because he thought the script was too violent. A year later, he starred in the equally brutal Die Hard, becoming an action icon overnight. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson rejected the role of John McClane in Die Hard and almost immediately accepted Martin Riggs instead. Essentially, both actors swapped what would become career-defining franchises. The connection runs even deeper: Die Hard with a Vengeance actually originated as a script for a Lethal Weapon sequel. The spec script was originally titled “Simon Says”.
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